Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc

Episode 8

I am not sure that Demon Slayer could have picked a worse possible time to insert a nearly twenty-minute-long flashback. I've gone on at length about the abysmal pacing that has dragged down The Swordsmith Village Arc, so my apologies ahead of time for sounding like such a broken record, but seriously, Demon Slayer? We have managed to progress the in-universe clock maybe, what, fifteen minutes or so over the last two hours of episodes? Even if my estimations are off, the point remains that this one single fight that has encompassed the majority of this season has already taken too damned long by half, and yet Demon Slayer still figured that we absolutely needed this half-hour-long Muichiro flashback, just so we can all truly understand how and why he gets his big power boost and takes a swing at Mouth-Eyes Guy.

Except, here's the thing: We really, truly did not need this flashback. Sure, if we were to view this whole memory as a standalone short film with absolutely no connection to the larger narrative of Demon Slayer, it would be a perfectly functional bit of fairy tale tragedy. Muichiro and his twin Yuichiro are stuck living in the middle of the mountain woods like the mono-gendered Japanese versions of Hansel and Gretel, only there's not even a deceptively tasty candy house to distract them from the hell that is life in Early-20th-Century-Japan-Except-With-100%-More-Demons-Than-Was-Historically-Accurate. For a lot of folks, Demon Slayer is much more about "vibes" than it is the actual execution of its story, and these vibes are just as bloody and sad as any other flashback story that we've gotten from the show.

That's my big issue, though. At its core, this peek into the backstory of the season's central Hashira doesn't do anything new or interesting whatsoever, on either a thematic or a narrative level. Demon Slayer has been doing its thing for years now. At this point, we get how hard it is for all of the non-"chosen ones" to survive in this world of demons and slayers, especially when they're kids, and especially especially if they're kids that are also siblings. This flashback to the ugly, gory death of Yuichiro doesn't give us any insight into the setting, the nature of its villains, the scope of the larger conflicts within the story, or any other elements that have been sorely underdeveloped to this point. Worse yet, the flashback doesn't even make Muichiro a more interesting character. His reaction to Kotetsu's sacrifice last week was much more powerful and immediate, and it told us everything about the guy we need to know to understand why he might want to whoop some demon ass.

The question I kept asking myself once I finished “The 'Mu' in Muichiro” was whether or not Demon Slayer would lose anything if that entire flashback was cut from the show completely. There are still a few episodes to go, but I would be willing to bet money that my answer to that question three weeks from now will still be, "No." We still would have gotten all of the cool shots that we come to Demon Slayer to see, like that squid attack that Mouth-Eyes unleashes or the admittedly badass thirty seconds of fighting that we got a glimpse of at the very end of the episode. Even better, we would have gotten to all that stuff even sooner, and the whole season would have been over a week earlier.

Man... a fellow can dream, can't he?

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Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Swordsmith Village Arc is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on Twitter, his blog, and his podcast.